Milk Bread
2 teaspoons salt 1/2 cup yeast, or 1/2 yeast cake 6 cups flour 1 tablespoon sugar Put butter, lard, sugar and salt in mixing bowl. Add scalded milk. Dissolve yeast cake in one fourth cup lukewarm water. Add to milk mixture when lukewarm.
Add flour, knead until smooth. Cover tightly and let rise until double its bulk, in temperature of sixty-eight degrees.
Knead; shape into loaves or biscuit; let rise in pans until double its bulk. Bake in hot oven: biscuit twenty to thirty minutes, loaves sixty minutes. This bread may be made without kneading by omitting one cup flour and beating ten minutes.
A plain enriched white loaf of the sort that filled American bread bowls before commercial bakeries took over. The method is sound; the measurements and oven directions need translating.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list as printed gives only salt, yeast, flour and sugar, though the method calls for butter, lard and scalded milk. The original amounts are lost; a workable reconstruction for six cups of flour would be about two cups of milk and two tablespoons each of butter and lard.
- YeastA yeast cake is compressed fresh yeast, roughly 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, proofed in the quarter cup of lukewarm water. The alternative "cup yeast" is homemade liquid barm and has no modern equivalent.
- Scalding the milkScalding was done to deactivate components in raw milk that weaken gluten. Pasteurized milk needs only to be warmed, but it must still be cooled to lukewarm before it meets the yeast.
- Rising temperatureSixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit is a cool room, and the first rise will take two hours or more. That slowness is deliberate and gives better flavor than a warm, fast proof.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" in this period is generally taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F, which is fierce for an hour-long bake in a loaf pan. Bake loaves at 400F and start checking at 35-40 minutes; rolls at 425F will be done in 15-20.
- Judging donenessRather than trusting the stated times, pull the loaf when the internal temperature reads 190-200F and the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.
- The no-knead variantOmitting one cup of flour and beating ten minutes produces a batter bread. Beat with a stand mixer's paddle on medium; the dough should be sticky and pull into strands. Bake it in a greased pan without shaping.
- YieldSix cups of flour makes two standard 9x5 loaves, or about eighteen dinner rolls.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; like Baker's and Hershey's promotional books it mixed advertising for the firm's cocoa with a full course of general household cookery. Milk bread belongs to that general course: an enriched white loaf in which milk and a little fat replace some or all of the water, giving a softer crumb, a browner crust and a loaf that stales more slowly than a lean water dough. The instruction to let the dough rise at sixty-eight degrees is a mark of the period's new scientific domestic science movement, centered in Boston, which pushed cooks toward level measurements and stated quantities in place of the older language of warm corners and generous handfuls.